Nobel pursuit in sand of dead habit
Source: By Shiv Visvanathan: The Asian Age
Science is part dream, part play, part rigorous work, and to be original it must remain that way... This our science planners did not understand. They created bureaucracies, not nurseries of talent. Indians and the middle class in particular have always been full of aspirations. We are a nation that suffers from prize envy. We have always wondered why a large population such as ours produces so few Olympic medals and even fewer Nobel prizes. Tagore and Raman are conceived as Halley's comets of the mind: spectacular, but few and far between.
Of late there have been detailed speculations on policy, institution building and even comparisons between India and China as intellectual nations. One of the most interesting observations was made by Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, who noted that in the decade to come, the Chinese economy will mature, but China, he complained, was too conformist a mindset.
Its younger generation still had to be sent to American universities to learn free thought and the comradeship of originality. America as a society has three properties -its democracy, its universities and its policy of an open society -that give it a comparative advantage of the intellect.
Indian analysts have also analysed our lack of originality in terms of misplaced policy. Sociologists have analysed our pursuit of relevance and argued for a return to the pure sciences as a way of sustaining originality. Other analysts have shown that our society has encouraged few Ramans, finding their obsessive pursuit of problems an onerous task. A Raman, a Krishnan or a G.N. Ramachandra remains moments of nostalgia, markers that we were once close to the Nobel dream.
Our analysis often gets obsessed with university rankings and confuses productivity and creativity. The search for the Nobel, or even a pursuit of originality, remains either a reductionist explanation or too anecdotal a collection of stories to outline strategy. We often forget that a Raman or a Ramanujan are not created by policy. They owe their originality to eccentricity, to moments of serendipity, to roots in a sub-culture that are not easy to replicate.
Bibliometrics on research planning is not really the magic wand for such explosion of originality. Originality and creativity do not demand mystical conditions. Their origins and requirements are decipherable as a framework of possibilities rather than as guarantees. Many of the myths of Indian science go back to Raman's laboratory though J.C. Bose's laboratory was as original.
Raman's laboratory was a combination of a gurukul and a gharana; it was a community of acolytes and collaborators and a style of research breaking new ground around a new domain: spectroscopy. As a research group Raman's laboratory emphasised two things -a sense of play and a sense of exuberance. Science was a way of life, ascetic but intrinsically rewarding. What made it exciting was the community of conversation and a sense that the group was world-class.
Playfulness and sense of originality is central to science, a sense of eccentric wagers which some times turn out to be true. There is something else one notice. It is a kind of exuberant obsessiveness, a blowtorch focus in pursuit of a goal. Pure research is often a wager in the dark, an act of faith, an intuitive hunch that a certain approach will work despite the scepticism of the community.
It is the confidence to stand alone, to accept the rules of the game and convince your peers of your originality. Think of the Raman school. There was Krishnan, a legend in his own right, Ramanathan who later created another great laboratory in PRL along with Vikram Sarabhai, Ramdas and Ramasawamy who blazed grounds in tropical meteorology, Ganesan who edited Current Science, G.N.
Ramachandran, a legendary biophysicist and younger scientists like Panchpakesan and Rameseshan, all trailblazers in their own right. A style, a problem, a community combined to create a legend, a community with depth, continuity and continuing inventiveness. It was a nursery of legends, all with a common ancestry. There was no immediate emphasis on use as justification. As Raman proudly claimed, he would rather think of one more property of the diamond than worry about its industrial uses.
Science is part dream, part play, part rigorous work and to be original, it must remain that way. Originality can only exist in a culture which can absorb failure. A scientist claiming to be original can be right but also wrong and he needs the critical stamina to survive mistakes critically and inventively. Without the generosity to the mistake, originality becomes remote. One must understand there is a cycle to creativity. Groups have to renew themselves, rework problems and abandon old obsessions. Originality needs to reseed itself.
Chandrashekhar, the astrophysicist, used to research a new field or problem every 10 years, contributing something original to every domain he entered. Science demands a stamina that even marathoners would envy.
Such a culture cannot be created by bureaucratic fiat, through hierarchical chains of command. One seeds the availability of innovation and eccentricity but must realise it is a wager, a statement of hope. This our science planners did not understand. They created bureaucracies, not nurseries of talent which might be antagonistic to hierarchy or academic fiat.
It is only such a conception where the eccentric, the obsessive and the oddball have a place that science becomes possible. It is not about investment and equipment alone. A laboratory, like a symphony, has to be a collection of soloists and team players. This India needs to understand. A wager in creativity and a technocratic preoccupation with rankings belong to different worlds. One hopes our science will be allowed to return to such a state. Then Nobel and other medals of science might follow these new wagers of the intellect and a Raman, Bose or Ramanujan return to haunt our imagination in playful ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment